Corona crisis at Maybrit Iller: The ice princess and the apostle of reason

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Maybrit Illner with guests: As in Goethe's »Faust«

Photo: ZDF / Svea Pietschmann

Talk shows today are like classic performances in the theater. Every viewer knows that he or she sees and overhears nothing new, but only listens to and looks at the current interpretation of the same material. As with Goethe and Schiller, many in the audience are now able to speak the street hits by heart. In Maybrit IIlner's ZDF Thursday evening show they are called "We need openings, that is not negotiable" and "We just have to hold out for a few more weeks".

They are recited by the sports representative Katharina Witt and the health politician Karl Lauterbach, who has somehow directed this production - but of course the roles could also be embodied by various other actors. Because no matter how grandiose the individual achievements of the actors may be: Whenever Corona and politics are discussed on German television in these weeks, the interchangeability and déjà vu motto is as in Goethe's »Faust«: swaying figures. "

This time the motto of the Illner show and the staging specification is "First emergency brake, then full throttle - for whom is the pandemic over?"

Ex-ice skater Witt, medicine man Lauterbach, Hessian Prime Minister Volker Bouffier and German Ethics Council chairwoman Alena Buyx are sitting in an astonishingly close, mask-free group in a stage setting that shows a vaccination syringe on the one hand and a corona test strip made of plastic on the other.

Always the same piece - every single evening

On stage is the director Illner, who tries to drive her ensemble to emotional, intellectual and interpretive top performances with questions such as: "Have we exaggerated in the past?" Of course, she means the measures to contain the pandemic.

The allegedly most indestructible of all plays, to this day the longest uninterrupted drama in the world, is called "The Mousetrap" and is the work of Agatha Christie.

It was performed daily in London's West End from November 25, 1952 to March 16, 2020.

The play »The Corona Trap«, which is currently being shown on many German TV channels, could one day overtake it.

Because it is practically scheduled every evening for an indefinite period of time - this Thursday evening, as in many other productions of the material, it is announced that the pandemic (and thus also the talk shows on pandemic issues) us viewers for many years to come. oh what decades, will accompany.

In the end there is the cheeky claim

The actor Lauterbach warns of a "false security".

His teammates talk about the threat of future virus mutants and other waves of infection.

Alena Buyx, who appears almost in the role of a seer - following the example of the sage Teiresias in many ancient Greek plays - says: "There is no positive vision."

Is there still hope?

In the theater world, the interpretation of the same classics by Schiller, Goethe and Shakespeare has been supplemented in recent years by "post-dramatic" innovations, thanks to which the actors on the stage more and more detach themselves from the specifications of the drama with so-called performative freedoms.

At "Maybrit Illlner" on Thursday one could already see signs of this. The actor Buyx at least called for "more participatory formats" in future gossip about Corona. The fellow player Bouffier promised the fantasy work on "control mechanisms". And the director Illner cheekily claimed at the end: "Everything is getting better". In Friedrich Schiller's "Don Karlos", a favorite drama of the Germans, a popular phrase goes: "The idea was childish, but divinely beautiful."